fect appeared later, but it came, if anything, with greater results than in France and Italy; and, with the new learning, came a natural desire to do their work well to settle the laws which were to rule literary production.

It will always be found that a period of great creative fervor is followed by one of careful workmanship. The Elizabethan drama was in many ways devoid of art. In Marlowe there are magnificent bits of exaggeration; in Shakspere there are false notes — although nowadays, as was the case in Pope's time, reference to them is dan

How will our fathers rise up in a rage,

And swear all shame is lost in George's age!"

and it is easy to see how the same quality existed in the later writers until we come to Davenant, in whom, as we shall see, forced fury became a sort of parody of the really grand style. Even in Ben Jonson we see the contrast of artistic workmanship; and his cool precision found many admirers and imitators.

Then, too, with the complications of politics and the fervor of religious dissensions, the theatre became the resort of courtiers alone, and lost its authority as a place for the expression of national feeling. With the rise of Puritanism English life was severed into two distinct branches. One clung to literature, the other to religion, and it is perhaps only in our own days that the two currents are again uniting.

As soon as literature became the property of the ruling classes, it of course lost its national spirit and acquired a sort of cosmopolitan polish. Nowhere had literature become so much the possession of the aristocracy as in France, where the court was the sole patron of literary

fame. What it was there in the seventeenth century may be seen in Taine's essay on Racine; and the literature of France was built up almost entirely on that of Rome. The French, for instance, cared very little for Homer until this century, as may be readily shown.

In the revival of letters, the French naturally found the acquisition of Latin infinitely easier than that of Greek,* and, moreover, Vergil's fame had lived throughout the dark ages-mainly, to be sure, from the poet's reputation as a magician; the other great writers were almost forgotten. In the sixteenth century, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, in his "Poetices," lib. v. (1561), lavished every sort of praise on Vergil, and had no good words for Homer. With what judgment he did this may be gathered from the way in which he went astray in some of his comments. In the sixth book of the "Eneid," 667, Vergil placed a certain Musæus at the head of a band of poets-a Musæus whose name alone has come down to us. Scaliger imagined that he meant the author of "Hero and Leander" -the poem which was paraphrased rather than translated by Marlowe and Chapman, begun, that is, by Marlowe and finished by

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As to the way in which the Catholic Church threw its weight on the side of Latin as against Greek literature, see Nisard, Littérature Française," i. 431, and Mark Pattison's "Casaubon," p. 113.

This was the general opinion. "When Aldus Manutius conceived his great idea of issuing Greek literature from the Venetian press, he put forth Hero and Leander' first of all in 1498, with a preface that ran as follows: I was desirous that Musæus, the most ancient poet, should form a prelude to Aristotle and the other sages who will shortly be imprinted at my hands.'"-Symonds, "Greek Poets," ii. 348 [Am. ed.].

See also Waller's poem, "On the King's Escape." Addison, Spectator, No. 62, expresses his doubts on account of the conceits in the poem. Criticism, like everything else, is a plant of slow growth.

About 1540 appeared in Spanish Boscan's blank-verse translation of "Hero and Leander;" in 1541, Marot's French version.

Chapman, and published among Marlowe's works. Chapman, too, thought that the original poem was by the older Musæus, as we see by the last line :

They [Hero and Leander] were the first that ever poet sung."

The Greek poem was apparently written by the grammarian Musæus in the fifth century of the Christian era. Scaliger, having fallen into this error, went on to prove that the author of the "Hero and Leander" was in every way superior to Homer, saying, "If Musæus had written what Homer wrote, we may conclude that he would have done much better :"*"Arbitror enim si Musæus ea quæ Homerus scripsit, scripsisset, longè melius eum scripturum judicemus."

For more than two centuries Scaliger's opinion of the superiority of Vergil remained the opinion of the French nation. There were, to be sure, men who knew how to admire both La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, and others; but, in general, the French agreed with Voltaire in putting Homer below Tasso. Voltaire said ("Essai sur les Mœurs," chap. exxi.): "As for the Iliad,' let every reader ask himself what his judgment would be if he were to read that poem and Tasso for the first time without knowing the names of the authors or when the poems were written, and deciding only from the pleasure.

*Poetices," v. 215 et seq.: "Musæi hiatus rari, et lectis utitur verbis." See further de Homero et Vergilio: "Loquax Achilles in concione minas perfert deteriores, flet etiam apud matrem, atque hic est, a quo virum fortissimum Hectorem interfectum credi vult? Nihil putidius Hectoris morte." "Homeri epitheta sæpè frigida, aut puerilia, aut locis inepta."

Ronsard seems to have been one of the earliest of Greek-reading FrenchOne of his sonnets begins,

men.

"Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère,

Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi."

† Vide Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries du Lundi," xii. 78 et seq.

that each gave him. Would he not in every respect give the preference to Tasso? Would he not find in the Italian poet more control, interest, variety, precision, grace, and that delicacy which sets off the sublime? In a few centuries all comparison between them will be impossible."

Need we wonder that Goethe said ("Eckermann," Feb. 24, 1830): "It took the French some time to appreciate the great merit of Homer: there was required for this nothing less than a complete revolution in their civilization" "?

The French in the age of Louis XIV. had acquired a civilization that was in many ways superior to that of all the rest of Europe, and, while England was led to follow the literary methods of France by causes that were entirely national, the great reputation of the Augustan age of French literature naturally inspired imitation. And, to repeat, French literature, like that of Italy, was especially a copy of the Roman literature, which, as I have said, was itself a copy of that of Greece. Just as a light that is reflected into a dark corner by a series of mirrors loses something with every additional mirror,* so did the inspiration of Greek literature, through Rome and France, shine with feeble glow in what is sometimes called the Augustan age of English letters. Greek literature was original; and what is best in all literature is the most natural form of expression a form that grows from the soil. We shall see later how the revival of the natural forces in English and French, and their appearance in German literature, coincided with renewed study of the Greek.

This digression, however, must not make us lose sight of the question now before us, which is the amount and

* Dr. Johnson said ("Boswell," vii. 188: April 29, 1778): "Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light-with light borrowed from the ancients."

nature of the French influence. We are always too ready to think that we have explained a difficulty if we are able to give it a name, and in the present case the explanation of the change in English literature might be left where it is without further discussion. Yet a more careful examination will make it clear that the subject, which is obscure at the best, needs more light. Fully to understand the relation of the writers of this period to their predecessors and to their foreign rivals, we must bear in mind the complex sequences of the Renaissance. When all the majesty of antiquity broke upon Europe, there seemed to be but one feeling possible: that of unrestrained admiration before its great glory. Writers-and the writers do but represent the reading public-fairly prostrated themselves before the past. They turned away from their own literature to welcome the newly discovered one. The first thing to be done was to study the writings of Greece and Rome, and everywhere, in Italy, in France, in England, we find the effort was made to remodel the vernacular after the classic languages. Boccaccio, Mr. Symonds tells us, "sought to give the fulness and sonority of Latin to the periods of Italian prose. He had the Ciceronian cadence and the labyrinthine sentences of Livy in view."* And Boccaccio's prose became the model copied by later writers when it was finally settled that Latin was not to be the literary language of Italy.

In France we find Ronsard complaining of the meagreness of his native tongue, while at the same time he denounces those who avoided the difficulty by writing in Latin. He, too, was abused for introducing classicisms into the French language. Yet how could he rest satisfied with the comparatively meagre vocabulary and

"Renaissance in Italy," iv. 133; v. 246 et seq.